After nearly two years of pandemic lockdown, it’s easy to let your world shrink to the little you can see outside the window, just this side of the trees at the back of the yard. TV is no help, stuck in an endless loop of fake news fighting real news, conspiracies battling confirmation, tucked in between messy hurricanes and war evacuations.
That’s why it’s important for principled columnists — like me — to go that extra mile to keep your world expanded beyond the narrow bounds of your lockdown life, to keep you up-to-date firsthand on things that don’t sit just outside your window in Huntley.
Things like…oh, lobsters, for example. Which are definitely not just outside your window in Huntley.
My preliminary research tells me that about 90 percent of the nation’s lobster supply is caught off the coast of Maine. But, let’s face it, that information could be fake news, right? The road to the truth isn’t paved by lazy research.
That’s why, as I write these words, I am sitting in a rented room in Bar Harbor, Maine, working hard to do original, firsthand lobster research for you. My writer friend, Carol, is here too, to guarantee that what I write is the unvarnished truth, because second-source confirmation is vital to good journalism, and you deserve no less.
You’re welcome.
A female lobster lays anywhere from several thousand to 100,000 eggs at a time, but only one-tenth of one percent of those eggs will develop and live past six weeks in the larva stage. Shedding its exoskeleton some 25 times and growing a new shell, slowly growing in length and weight each time, it will take four to seven years for one of those larvae to grow to one pound in weight.
In the five days that Carol and I have been here in Maine conducting our research for you, we have closely examined several of those one-pound lobsters, usually in the vicinity of a small tub of drawn butter.
You’re welcome.
Though a lobster in the wild has an average lifespan of fifty years, that number may have to be adjusted after our visit. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and you can’t do exhaustive lobster research without revisiting the crustacean mortality charts.
Left alone, lobsters can grow to monstrous size. The largest known lobster measured more than 36 inches and weighed more than 42 pounds—the size of a kindergartner. It is mounted in the Museum of Science in Boston. (The lobster, not the kindergartner.) I don’t know where they mounted the mountain of butter they saved by not boiling up that beast. (Again, the crustacean, not the kid.)
But exhaustive lobster research has to extend beyond docks and delicatessens.
That’s why, over the past few days, Carol and I have also explored the landscape in and around Bar Harbor, including hiking trails on Mount Desert Island in Acadia Park, winding up and around Cadillac Mountain, which, at more than 1500 feet, is the highest point on the Atlantic Seaboard. We saw no lobsters on any of the trails all the way to the top, or in any of the deciduous trees whose vivid colors are already beginning their stunning autumn show. Although not conclusive, it is further evidence of the widely held theory that lobsters are entirely marine creatures, spending little or no time on land or in trees.
Good research demands such rigorous verification.
With our lobster research drawing to a close here in Bar Harbor, tomorrow we’ll head to Bangor, where we’ll visit Stephen King’s house. My deadline for this column is today, but if we find that lobsters are avid fans of horror fiction writers, I’ll let you know in a future column.
By the time you read this, I will be back in Huntley. I may be a bit chunkier than the last time you saw me, because good research can pack on the pounds if you do it right.
Anyway, I thought it was important to go all the way to Maine to conduct my lobster research for you, rather than just calling up Mama Google and passing on to you a pile of questionable facts in this column. Digging up the truth from a trip to Google is nowhere near as reliable as doing it from a trip to Maine—and it’s hard to write off Google research as a job-related tax deduction.
That’s why I thought you deserved to get the facts through exhaustive, firsthand, butterfingered research. Because that’s the kind of honest, principled journalist I happen to be.
You’re welcome.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.
